In today's world of decreased state funding, lower retention and graduation rates, and increased scrutiny from a government perspective, it is imperative we in higher education use all of the tools in our arsenal to create strong student success and allow them to achieve the dream of a college education. CLEP is such a tool.
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Academic advisors at access institutions whose missions, in part, are to break the cycle of poverty, often encounter root causes of social problems in their student populations. One challenge that affects retention and graduation rates is unplanned pregnancy in college students. The key to breaking the cycle and providing better chances of positive outcomes is to design institution-appropriate interventions that effect change.
: In efforts to provide active support for retaining first-time, full-time freshmen, the School of Business Administration at Portland State University (PSU) decided to hire a full-time advisor dedicated to supporting this population. The purpose of the First Year Programs Advisor was to research the needs of the freshmen population, manage and analyze retention data, and develop advising-based programs and resources (as well as last-minute, drop-in advising) that meet the needs of those students. The author discusses the research done on retention and the programs developed out of that research.
NACADA’s new partnership with Complete College America strongly demonstrates the centrality of academic advising to college completion and affordability. This article presents numerous ways advisors can boost affordability for their students, including strategies which facilitate timely degree completion and methods for serving as advocates for affordability-related programs, services, and even campus mindset.
The notion of peer mentoring for Indigenous students has captured all aspects of the author’s life, inspiring passion for development of a thriving and positive student community where students do not have to feel like just a student number, but a member of the community.
Academic advisors promote student development through providing readily accessible information and guidance to students and by helping them feel stimulated and challenged as they work toward meeting their academic goals. Academic advisors can also help students develop in other ways outside of a traditional advising appointment.
Acting as the hub of the wheel while drawing on the three components of academic advising (conceptual, informational, relational), academic advisors can help their advisees adapt to the culture of their higher education environment and empower them to take an active part in their journey to success.
Developing a sense of belonging in the first year is critical to whether or not a student will be retained. Orientation and the first-year seminar are ideal places to begin. The author offers strategies created to nurture belongingness for first-year students which can be applicable to a wide range of academic programs, institutions, and advisors and can be implemented at no cost.
Only a handful of institutional-level degree completion programs currently exist responding to senior attrition. Recognizing the societal and institutional value of such initiatives, a few universities have established their own institutional programs to help students who stopped out of school to return and graduate. In this article, four programs are discussed and compared.
Academic advising is the very core to education and sustaining students, but how academic advising supports student learning is unclear, especially international students who grow up in a foreign culture. Supporting international student learning in academic and career advising is rarely discussed in professional practices nor scholarly work. To build a sustainable model of retaining international students, universities and academic advising must proactively invest efforts to define and deliver outcomes related to international students’ academic success. This article is to introduce Syracuse University’s International Student Success Model, share strategies and initiatives developed and implemented to help achieve increased international student retention. The significance of this model will change the narrative of international student support services, most importantly, bridging the gap between academic advising and international education.
A recent study analyzed academic advising structures at U.S. research institutions and how they relate to student success outcomes of first-year retention and six-year graduation rates. It found that a significant relationship exists and is improved with a shared model of academic advising. However, it is also the case that many institutions across the U.S. are organized such that individual academic units together comprise a university’s decentralized undergraduate structure. What can a siloed university do to begin to shift towards a shared model of academic advising? With collaborative and holistic advising at the core, this article provides five practical recommendations to assist institutions at any stage in advising redesign: 1) define advising, 2) develop a university-wide advising counsel or committee, 3) create standard training resources and communication mechanisms, 4) provide informal opportunities for advisors to connect, and 5) recognize and celebrate advisors.
